Dealing with the sudden and unexplained Twitter account suspension of Splinterlands over the last few days has got me asking a lot of questions, and not just the obvious accusatory and conspiratorial ramblings (examples below) that usually surround the blockchain crowd and social media.
Who wants us silenced?
Are we a threat to big gaming? Big finance? Big social media?
How deep does the rabbit hole go?
As some of you may know, as the Splinterlands Content Director I am almost always the man behind the tweets for Splinterlands. If you had told me two years ago that I would use Twitter multiple times daily and value it highly as a free marketing tool, I would have laughed at you. I would have laughed at you so wildly and madly that you would back away slowly and perhaps call the authorities.
But as I learned very quickly when I dived into the Twitter world for the first time in 2020, it can be incredibly useful for marketing, especially with a company like Splinterlands whose specialty is community-generated content. Because of the nature of the Steem blockchain on which Splinterlands was first created (and the newly formed Hive blockchain to which it migrated in mid 2020), users have always been rewarded for creating and sharing Splinterlands content. Thanks to the brilliant efforts of Carrie Allen, the community was guided and rewarded for not only creating that content, but sharing it on outside social media (such as Twitter).
The unique system of incentivized blockchain sharing that Splinterlands pioneered (with Hive's help of course) even evolved into a Hive 2nd layer blogging platform called Splintertalk that offers additional rewards to Splinterlands specific content in the form of the Splintertalk (SPT) token. Because of creations of Splinterlands co-founder and CEO Jesse "Aggroed" Reich such as Tribes and Hive-Engine, any community within the blockchain can incentivize themselves in a similar fashion. This undervalued aspect of the Hive blockchain makes it one of the most innovative projects in crypto, and people are starting to notice.
Do we Still Need Twitter?
The social media giant's resources have certainly made it easier to share Splinterlands' messages and content through the years. We have definitely grown because of new organic reaches found through Twitter. Still I have to say that even if Twitter explodes our account forever and forces us to find future workarounds for everything we got from them, Splinterlands will be ok. Whether or not we ever needed Twitter to begin with is anyone's guess.
I can't help but thinking Twitter waited until Splinterlands crossed the threshold of no longer needing their help to make their strange (and now ineffective) power move. It was only a couple months ago that we were attempting to run sponsored ads and actually pay Twitter for additional reach and promotion. The first indication that something like this was coming was when they refused to accept our ads and our money. That was a bit of a disappointment, especially since I spent a great deal of time creating short videos and GIFs specifically for a Twitter audience to showcase various aspects of the game.
Bigger and Better
Unfortunately for them, Twitter may have overestimated its ability to push Splinterlands around. Since the announcement of the upcoming governance token, SPS, the already-growing ecosystem has been growing at an ever-increasing pace. Remaining land sold out in mid June in a sudden last minute rush, followed only days later by the remaining supply of Untamed booster packs.
Splinterlands recently began working with a very successful PR firm that specializes in blockchain companies, so we are now able to distribute our news wires to a wide rage of crypto publications. With the SPS private token sale portion of the release, Splinterlands gained a number of new partners with substantial reaches and influence networks of their own, whose missions now align with Splinterlands'.
Because the game and community of Splinterlands were grown from the ground up, we are that much more difficult to silence. Each day that Twitter is silent about the reasons for this suspension will result in more members of the Hive community rising up and becoming vocal on Twitter's territory. They will make sure that crypto Twitter knows about the censorship in the same way that they made sure the wider crypto world learned about Justin Sun's attempted takeover of Steem in early 2020, which resulted in the formation of the Hive blockchain.
Hivers Know how to Fight for Justice
As a writer and a marketer, I know how to play ball in any arena. But like most crypto and blockchain enthusiasts, I found this world because of being red-pilled to some degree by the mainstream world of content creation and social media. Almost everyone who has found the Hive blockchain has done so escaping an injustice of some sort. The blockchain began in the first place as a protest to the attempted takeover of the Steem blockchain created by Dan Larimer.
Many of Hive's users consider themselves out of the mainstream. They are experienced with red pills and rabbit holes. They love memes, trolling, philosophies, conspiracies and theories. While they have a collection of wildly varying opinions on every possible topic, they can all agree on a couple things: Free speech is Good, and Censorship is Bad.
When these freedom-loving fighters for justice get a chance to get riled up about something, it validates everything they joined up with the blockchain crowd for in the first place. It's their chance to tell everyone why we must have decentralized systems that are resistant to censorship. And every time we get a chance like that, we chip away little by little at the countless throngs who still trust mainstream social media to protect their right to free speech.
This Suspension will be Remembered
Even if the Splinterlands Twitter account is destroyed forever, Splinterlands will continue to thrive, onboarding new people everyday and showing them the power of blockchain gaming and true asset ownership. Even if it was some kind of algorithmic accident and it gets reinstated as soon as the issue is noticed by a real person (if there are any of those working at Twitter), this suspension will serve as a reminder. I will make sure that it gets remembered, reaffirming for all of us why we went blockchain, and why it is high time that the world follows us.
A Twitter ban is a Rite of Passage.
Thank you to out-of-the mainstream content platforms everywhere, especially Publish0x, for protecting free speech and everyone's right to express themselves. In these moments we come alive, and however dysfunctional we may be, I'm proud to be part of this huge and wonderful blockchain family.
Thanks for reading Non-Fungible Stew
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